Finding a job is hard. Finding a job as an inexperienced student that can only legally work during certain times is next to impossible. Many states in the US place caps on when, where, and how long students can work, especially during the school year. Even jobs that students once held a monopoly on, such as babysitting, fast food, and minimum wage positions in a local store, have become fiercely competitive as out-of-work adults find themselves willing to settle for anything that will put food on the table.

There are many sites and services that aim to connect job seekers with employers, but very few of them are specifically catered to students. Turning to Monster or Craigslist as a student is much the same as job hunting the old fashioned way, with the same struggles outlined above. Flipgigs, a bootstrapped service that launched this past May, is looking to raise between $500,000 and $1 million to differentiate itself from other “Me too!” job sites by focusing specifically on students and their parents.

Flipgigs is one of a number of startups expanding the small-town mentality and challenging the notion of a 9-to-5 job. (Though, as anyone that works at a startup can tell you, working 9 to 5 would almost feel like a vacation.)

Tinkerers and craftspeople, who used to sell their wares based on word-of-mouth, now have Etsy. Travelers, and those lucky enough to own multiple properties, used to have to hope that their homes weren’t ransacked while they were away or pay a house-sitter; now they can list the property on Airbnb and make passive income while they’re away. Dog lovers used to have two ways of satisfying their canine cravings – dog walking and committing to just one pooch – but are now able to open their homes to a variety of pups for cash using DogVacay.

With Flipgigs, students can find “odd” jobs, such as tutoring, dog-walking, or other small, menial tasks, and earn income in their spare time. In theory, it wouldn’t be difficult to see a Flipgigger (the company’s term for students seeking jobs) continue to use the service to find those odd jobs even as other positions become available. In Silicon Valley speak, Flipgigs is like a new SaaS – Students as a Service. Someone wants an hour of work done here, another wants a half-hour done there, and a student is happy to fulfill both needs, for the right price.

The move reflects the current on-demand economy that has allowed services like Netflix and Spotify to flourish. If we, as a society, have decided that it’s pointless to walk to a physical location for our entertainment, why are we still wedded to the idea of a 40-hour work week? A huge number of capable, experienced adults struggling for positions at fast food chains (Note: If you do work at a fast food chain, we love you, so please don’t spit in our fries) is forcing students to adapt to this new economy and capitalize on any opportunity to make money.

Flipgigs founder Jayati Sengupta built Flipgigs to scratch her own itch, when her teenage daughter was unable to find a job via traditional means. Where most parents may ask around and post fliers, Sengupta decided to build a company. Both of her children have found jobs using Flipgigs, and Sengupta says that the platform has already spread across San Francisco, New York, and (surprisingly) the Midwest during its month-long existence.

Right now the service’s biggest competitor is TaskRabbit. While Sengupta says that she doesn’t view TaskRabbit as a competitor because the number of students that find work with the service is relatively small at 10 percent, if TaskRabbit were to suddenly decide to cater to students its established base and reputation may put an end to Flipgigs.

Sengupta is envisioning the company as a platform to avoid that very issue, positioning Flipgigs as the place for employers, parents, and students to connect and put those idle hands to work.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]